


Further Musings of an Incomplete Bastard

by islasands



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: Internal Monologue, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-11
Updated: 2011-10-11
Packaged: 2017-10-24 12:17:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam has always taken care to keep hope and despair in separate compartments in his heart. Perhaps it is time he let them meet one another, draw close enough to touch, - even kiss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Further Musings of an Incomplete Bastard

Part 1: A cup of water or milk...

I’m fucking up, and now this. Now this, when I only just talked to him, - when was it, two weeks ago? Three at the most. It cannot be. Not my Yves. Not him. The love of my... Of my what? Not my life.

No, not the love of my life. _He’s_ at home packing his bags. My poor love.

But Yves is the love of my core, my essence, who, from the moment we first met and fucked on a fire escape has denied me the least propriety of a lover’s claim. He made me his without any prospect of reciprocation; he simply and quietly and efficiently drove a stake into my chest. “Try removing this,” he said, “my little colonizer.” On a fire escape, several stories up, while the lights of Paris, above and below, glittered like sparks on the throat of a fire.

 _Sauli: “Always you turn yourself to him,”_

 _Me: “Because he is my confidante, my closest friend.”_

 _Sauli: “And your closest fuck. See? Your silence says all or nothing.”_

 _Me: “Says it all.”_

 _Sauli: “Don’t correct me. I am not your student.”_

And he is right. He is not my student. I am his. He has taught me to believe I am both beautiful and plain. Like a rock on a hillside. He clambers over me and laughs at my insecurities. He is the first, actually the only, man who wants to protect me and is capable of doing so merely with the touch of his hand. He steadies me. Truth is, he is a far more confident swimmer in the lake of love than I am.

But my love for Yves, oh fuck, my love for him is an ocean compared, and now I am crossing it to be at his side. I have to go. I have to see him one last time. How can I explain any of this to my love without it sounding like a betrayal? How to tell him that Yves has left his mark in me like a word that has been left in the rain, a permanent rain, so that the ink of his impression never dries. His lanky, languid, walk. His hands, eagle hands, running over my flesh as though they could see as well as touch. His smile, turning down at the corners, at once sardonic and unutterably tender. His voice, so sharply dismissive of my fears when he speaks to me in English, so pointedly attentive when using his own tongue.

 _La nuit s’épaississait ainsi qu’une cloison,  
_ _Et mes yeux dans le noir devinaient tes prunelles,  
_ _Et je buvais ton souffle, ô douceur! ô poison!_

 _The night would close around us like a dim blue wall,  
_ _And your eyes flashed within the darkness, and the sweet  
_ _Drug of your breath came over me._

I know that verse by heart. And now that voice will never speak to me again.

Last time we lay together it was on the desert floor of his latest installation. The entire gallery was in a foot deep in sand. There was nothing in the room but the odd photograph, here and there lying on the sand, the same photograph, of nothing more than a glass jug full of water, and an empty glass beside it. The sound of rain fell into the air. The lights were a soft blue, the colour of the dawn. We laid down and kissed. I needed his advice not his kisses but, as usual, fucking me is how he gave it. I’d gone to see him because I was on the brink of asking Sauli to come and live with me, and it felt like that. A brink. To a fall.

But instead of letting me talk Yves lay on the sand and put his hands behind his head. His jacket fell open and his shirt, in the strange blue light, was such an incandescent white I felt as though we were in a graveyard. That was the effect. I laid down beside him. He turned his face towards me, his eyes glimmering as though stones had just fallen into them, and began talking to me in French, words I could not understand. I closed my eyes and listened and suddenly, in a swift movement, he was lying on top of me and  kissing me and sliding his hands down my pants. The gallery door bells chimed, and people came into the gallery, and stood above us, looking down, as though we were part of the installation. And we were. In French, then in English, upon my lips, then just above them, he whispered:

 _This is our shore, our desert, our unmade bed_ (and his hand is forcing its way between my abdomen and my pants)

 _Lonely as rocks when the moon is staring_ (and his lips brushing mine like a brush made of silk filaments)

 _And you are invisible to all but my hands_ (and his tongue is inside the mouth of my heart, making me feel the redness of my own blood)

The gallery door closed and I knelt between his legs, my chest shuddering, like a child who has finished crying and has been given a cup of water or milk.

Part 2: The dark petals of karma...

I first saw him lurking at the post-show party. Our eyes met a couple of times, social smiles flew to and fro, and something else – something unexpected - happened. We stopped smiling at the same time and yet carried on looking at each other. Not in a sizing up way. More like we were taking mental photographs. But then I lost sight of him. I was so intent on getting wasted I never gave him another thought. I was so fucking happy and lonely in Europe! God, I felt like I’d been let off a leash. The unadulterated joy of anonymity.

And then when we were leaving, and I was cracking up at something one of the guys said, there he was. And suddenly we were alone.

 _Me: YOU!_

 _Sauli: I am no-one else!_

 _Me: I am glad. Oh fuck. I am very glad (_ those eyes, clear as glass, almost audibly twinkling at me. Laughing at me!)

 _Sauli: I see you sing. My heart leaps in terror!_

 _Me: Terror? That doesn’t sound like fun._ (and I am already fighting the urge to handle him, feel the flesh he is wearing beneath his clothes)

 _Sauli: You are a scary fuck, up there before my eyes. My mouth is open – like this!_ (and oh god, he drops his mouth open and raises his eyebrows and holds his arms up as though in surrender)

 _Me:_ (I have nothing to say because my hands have taken matters – his face – into their charge, and I am laughing, and now hisarms are dangling at his sides, and he has moved closer to me, and is smiling up at me. I hold his face in my hands and smile in return but it’s the wrong smile for a complete stranger. He knows it, and I know it.)

And later, when we fucked at the hotel, we lost our shit so damn joyously that I laughed, outright, with his cock in my mouth, and he swore in Finnish, laughing as he gripped himself and ejaculated all over my face. I was paralytic. I wept. He sat astride me and pulled hard on my nipples, and then the lobes of my ears, and then kissed my laughter abruptly away. And the entire night, whether we were stuffing ourselves with food or with fucking, I felt as though my cells were being soaked in a bath of premonition. Every time I looked at him I felt the sky in my brain being lit up by green coloured beams, arrayed like a fan made of water, rippling like green waves standing on end. And I thought to myself, this is it. This is it.

 _Only days before I had said ““I will find my viking… he’ll ride in on a ship… I will find my love at the arctic circle… in the northern lights.”_

And fuck, now he wants out. Wants to go home. And I cannot stop him, as in, I cannot refuse to see Yves, who is no threat to him or our happiness, and never would be, dead _or_ alive, and in fact was instrumental in ensuring I did not refuse that happiness. I visited Yves when I was already tossing and turning on dreams of Sauli, and told him about it, trying to share my reservations, and instead of listening he lectured me in his broken English while he fucked me in a bath that was filling with cold water, water so cold that as it rose my legs became too numb for me to feel the pain in my knees.

And as he rose within me, I began to shake uncontrollably, for it was winter in Paris...

Just as my heart was thawing. Or I thought it was.

 _Yves: You are trembling but only because you are cold and this is a cold fuck, isn’t it? A cold fuck for a cold fucker. Your teeth should be chattering because you want to love. But no. “What if my poor heart is re-broken?” What heart? Is your heart a fucking mirror? A sheet of ice? And you of all people, you whose art depends on something moving – the way I am moving – deep within you! Selfish, heartless prick. You think you are telling yourself a cautionary tale, but you’re not. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s the swan song of a plant whose roots are being blanched by the silence of living under a rock._

But then he dried me, and cradled me in his darkness, and read me Baudelaire:

 _Il me semble parfois que mon sang coule à flots,  
_ _Ainsi qu'une fontaine aux rythmiques sanglots.  
_ _Je l'entends bien qui coule avec un long murmure,  
_ _Mais je me tâte en vain pour trouver la blessure._

It seems to me at times my blood flows out in waves  
Like a fountain that gushes in rhythmical sobs.  
I hear it clearly, escaping with long murmurs,  
But I feel my body in vain to find the wound.

 _“Oh my dear love,”_ he said, kissing my eyes shut, one by one, “ _you are not made to withstand Baudelaire. Not with this,”_ and he laid his hand on my chest. _“Forgive me. You are a blind singer. The music of your_ _humanity, your rather mundane little_ _struggle, comes out of your music while the rest of you wanders around, a disconsolate youth, hands in your pockets, wondering if you will ever be loved, or arrive somewhere, or have a place to call home. And all the while, hidden in one of those pockets, is that treasure of yours, a treasure others would care greatly to possess.”_

Now, how could I ever explain to Sauli what Yves means to me?

How could I ever explain my debt? For I listened to Yves. I allowed the dark petals of my life’s karma to open. And I began to pursue Sauli – openly. 

Part 3: Eight minutes left to live...

And the flower opened and brought with it the fragrance of lemon blossoms and of lemons that have been halved. There was not a moment, night or day, when my heart didn’t tingle with sharply citric happiness. Sauli was, as my mother had predicted, my match. He lit up my life. Unbearably at times.

 _Me: Go away. I can’t look at you. I have to think, work, create, plan. If I look at you I want to find a cliff and jump off it._

 _Sauli:_ (pulling away from me, crestfallen) _A cliff? Why a cliff? I make you sad?_

 _Me:_ (pulling him back) _No, my speckled bird, you make me think if I jumped off a cliff I could fly._ (and he straddles my lap, and grips my wrists, and forces my arms out full length. We are chest to chest, face to face, out heads tilted back so that we are looking down our noses at one another. He twists his hips, edging his groin closer into mine. His mouth opens on an intake of breath when he feels me rising, inevitably, to the occasion.  

And then he’s off! He’s standing in front of me laughing at me. _“Now do your busy work, lover. Now think. Now make your creation. No cliff for you today!”_

But he is wrong for while he is stronger than I am, I am faster and I don’t giggle as much. Yes, he giggles. We both do. We fuck as though our love is catastrophic and we don’t care if it is the last thing we ever do, - and then we fall about laughing.

I have never felt so hopeful in my life! I have never felt so relaxed. It's as though someone has commanded the soldiers forever standing at attention in every cell of my body to stand at ease and they obey. Finally, they fucking obey.

 _And then the shadow falls, and I lie awake while he sleeps, and I feel my happiness struggling to get out of me, as though it is being suffocated, and I can’t prevent its escape. And I look at Sauli and cannot feel my connection to him. I look up, feeling desolate, and Yves’ face appears in the ceiling, not looking at me, but to one side, as he so often does, only glancing at me now and then. And I suddenly need him to do that right now. I need the power of him ignoring me most of the time. No different to the way he mainly ignores the art he collects. The art he loves. Objects that he now and then handles with his eyes or his hands. I am one of them. And God knows why anyone would hate being someone’s ‘object’. It is a relief, I tell you. A relief. I please him and that is it. He couldn’t give a shit about pleasing me._

 _He lets me off the hook of feeling so fucking responsible for everything I say and do, or don’t say and don’t do. He lets me be young and cry over foolish things. He ignores me, and waits until I am spent, and I come crawling to him, not in defeat or self-pity, but hungry and angry as a storm._

 _A storm of grief. Homeless grief._

 _What was that line I read, when he slept beside me in the sunlight, close to me yet so distant, his face closed as a closed book, his dreams so inaccessible, his heart so inhospitable, and a dove landed on our sill, and I felt as though the afternoon was a poem?_

 _I cherish even the coldness that you boast,  
_ _By which, harsh beast, you subjugate me most._

Then the lemony day dawns and the shadow is gone and Sauli is whistling tunelessly in the shower and I sit on the edge of the bed listening, feeling like the luckiest fucking fool that ever lived.

And a bigger fool than I suspected. Not at all the deep thinker, the over-thinker, I thought I was. I have learned this because of the language barrier between us. I can't just run my thoughts over him like rapids, but have to do it slowly, drop by drop, distilling my thoughts for him, - discovering in the process that I mainly talk shit. I don't think deeply at all. I worry a lot. In circles not depths.

Whereas Sauli, who hasn't a care in the world other than his true cares, me, his family, his friends, is so deceptively artless. I’m sure he thinks more deeply than anyone I have thought of as ‘intellectual’. I watch him do it, watch his eyes begin scanning something only he can see, like a diver walking out onto the platform, composing himself, bringing his body and mind into one accord before springing up, jack-knifing, turning, twisting, somersaulting, then straightening at the last moment to enter the water. And out his thoughts come, clear, lucid, cutting so finely to the chase I often do a double take.

 _Me: How do you do that?_

 _Sauli: I trust my mind. It knows what I do not know._

 _Me: You sometimes say in a single sentence what other people take entire books to say._

 _Sauli: When there are blizzards you want to know the quickest way home._

Home. Where is home? I am flying to Paris. Sauli is behind me, Yves before. I am being pulled apart. I can’t lose either of them, yet one is already lost, and the other is leaving. Oh Yves. I know I said I liked your indifference to my feelings but to ignore me forever? That was not the deal.

And Sauli, without your hand on my chest, your arm around me, in such calm possession of all the facts of me, and of our love. Without you it would be as though the sun went out. I would have eight minutes left to live.

Part 4: As blue as the evening sky...

I walk in and can’t help thinking this is an appropriate place for our last meeting. Clinical, bare, and as coldly factual as a glacier. Bit like his lawyer who brought me here, ushered me in, said something in French, and left me to him. We are the only two people in here. Why the fuck is he in a body bag? Surely by now he would be in a coffin. It’s been three days. And where is the attendant? Am I meant to unzip that fucking thing myself? Something is wrong here.

I approach the trolley. The body-bag is still and black and full of something I don’t want to know and don’t want to see. I want him to walk in and signal me with an upward jerk of his head and then fuck my brains out in the taxi ride home. Fuck my brains out. The expression is appropriate. He’d tap my forehead and say “ _In here, an interminable chorus of correctness. What a good boy he is, what an angel of good intentions he is, this generally harmless rebel with a smile. While in here_ ,” and he taps my chest “ _a crypt whose floor has never been swept, with death masks on the walls, wine on the walls, bloodstains from the wrists you never quite got the hang of slicing. And lying around in invisible rags, every sorrow you own, real or imagined, abandoned like toothless prostitutes whose services you refused to remunerate, both when you and they were young. And still refuse._ ”

 _That's how he talked to me. Like reading from a fucking book. Making me own my own evil, petty and small as it was. Now why? Why did he want me to do that?_

I read again the poem his lawyer said Yves wanted me to read. His bequest:

J'implore ta pitié, Toi, l'unique que j'aime,  
Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon coeur est tombé.  
C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé,  
Où nagent dans la nuit l'horreur et le blasphème;

Have pity, my one love and sole delight!  
Down to a dark abyss my heart has sounded,  
A mournful world, by grey horizons bounded,  
Where blasphemy and horror swim by night.

There is more but my eyes are swimming. Is he calling me his one love and true delight? I crumple the page and let it fall on the floor. I turn away, begin walking away, then I stop in my tracks. How fucking typical that he can leave me but I cannot leave him. I seriously begin to wonder if I could steal his body, have it embalmed, and stand his goddamn cadaver in my kitchen, leaning on the fridge, so that every time I go to feed my living flesh I am reminded of how this man knew where a whole lot of me is buried.

I go back and make my decision. Take a deep breath. Unzip the bag. And there he is, frozen in time - so I think, and then the unthinkable happens and he turns his fucking head and says “J'ai pensé que vous ne viendriez jamais. But here you are. I am so fucking cold and stiff.” His beautiful mouth turns down in a smile. ‘Aidez-moi à se lever.”

But I don’t help him to get up. I push him off the trolley and throw myself on him, trying to prevent him from extricating his legs from the bag. Then I do what I have never done. I punch him repeatedly, cutting his lip, his eyebrow, the side of his nose. He frees himself and we fight like animals, smashing into walls, benches, the trolleys. Our fight is well matched and seems to be taking forever. The mortuary fills with a strange violet coloured light. In the end I am lying beneath him and the weight of him, the memory of his weight, and of his bed, his hands, his eyes, his ribcage, his thin wrists, his lips, his narrow hips – make my arms fall at my sides. His face lowers towards mine and I raise my head to meet it. To kiss. To taste his blood.

Me: _Why?_

Yves: _Shhh. This is our last kiss._

Me: _I don’t want that._

Yves: _Nor do I. But it is the last kiss._

He rolls over on his back and puts his arm beneath me.

Yves: _Baudelaire says what I cannot. Listen carefully. I give it to you in your tongue, but it is contains the feeling of my own._

I love the greenish light of your long eyes,  
Sweet beauty, but today all to me is bitter;   
Nothing, neither your love, your boudoir, nor your hearth   
Is worth as much as the sunlight on the sea.

Yet, love me, tender heart! be a mother,   
Even to an ingrate, even to a scapegrace;   
Mistress or sister, be the fleeting sweetness   
Of a gorgeous autumn or of a setting sun.

Short task! The tomb awaits; it is avid!  
Ah! let me, with my head bowed on your knees,  
Taste the sweet, yellow rays of the end of autumn,  
While I mourn for the white, torrid summer!

And he couldn’t go on. We lay in silence while I stroked his hair. Suddenly Sauli came running into my mind as though running down a dune, arms outspread. And seeing him in my mind's eye like that makes me want to say to Yves, “You love me! All along, you fucking loved me!” But why share my shock? What good would it do?

Me: _Why here? In a fucking mortuary?_ (he wipes his lips and looks at his hand)

Yves: _It was the only way to break your bad habit of me._

Me: _Kiss me again. You have to. Then carry on. You fucking owe me._ (He rises up on his elbow and bends over me and kisses me and suddenly I feel the door of my heart opening and hear the sound of leaves being swept by the wind)

Yves: _I_ _could only keep you for so long as you thought I didn’t love you. But I do. After my fashion._ (and Sauli is in my mind again, turning at the edge of the sea, shouting something, but I am too far away to hear)

Me: _I can’t do this._

Yves: You _are already doing it, my love. This_ (he taps my chest) _is already running full tilt into the sun._ (he taps my brow). _Hope and despair. Meeting at last. How does it feel?_

Me: (I pull a face) _It feels wrong and right._

Yves: (smiling his sardonic smile) _Are they trying to kill each other the way we just did?_

Me: (laughing and kissing his eyes) _No._

Yves: _And Sauli?_

Me: _Has also kissed me goodbye._ (I pause) _Yet I feel hopeful._

Yves: (handing me the keys to his apartment) _I won’t be there. Leave them with the concierge. If you fuck anyone in my bed make sure you change the linen. Drink anything you can find, but not from the bottom racks._ (he checks his watch). _I’m late. You can take a taxi, can’t you?_

And _that_ is how a love the size of an ocean leaves me!

I am alone in Paris. I have brought nothing with me. I cannot think straight and am not sure I want to. _It was the only way to break your bad habit of me._ I search inside myself for some emotion, any damn emotion, and there is none. I feel like a man who has work to do.

I open the door to his apartment. Drop my bag on the floor. Take a deep, deep breath. But I am not alone.

Someone is tunelessly whistling in the kitchen. He comes into the living room and holds out a drink.

“You fucking bastards,” I manage to say. “He talked me over with you.”

He walks towards me and hands me the glass. “Also, he tried to fuck me,” he says, shyly smiling. I lean on the door. I am crying. Actually, I am laughing and crying at the same time. I physically check my heart. It is evening in there but I don’t mind the shadows. Parisian shadows. We are back we began, but it feels less like an anniversary and more like a milestone in our journey of love. Our little lake lies before us. I feel sure I could swim right across it and back!

And Sauli’s eyes are as blue as an evening sky.

 

 _  
_


End file.
